


if so

by soulofme



Category: Voltron: Legendary Defender
Genre: M/M, Pining Keith (Voltron), Pre-Keith/Shiro (Voltron), Pre-Kerberos Mission
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2021-01-27
Updated: 2021-01-27
Packaged: 2021-03-12 12:14:20
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,735
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/29010354
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/soulofme/pseuds/soulofme
Summary: It takes him eight seconds to close the space between them.
Relationships: Keith/Shiro (Voltron)
Comments: 3
Kudos: 44





	if so

There are eight seconds separating him from the kitchen. Turning the corner from the barracks takes two, maybe three. It takes another two to look down both ways of the hall, just to make sure no one on patrol sees him. That’s four seconds accounted for. The final four will take Keith past the dining hall and into the attached kitchen.

Today, it takes him over a minute.

His hand is on the steel knob of the kitchen door. He’s gripping it hard enough that he doesn’t need light to know his knuckles have gone white. Even through his thick socks, the floor is cold beneath his toes. He scrunches them, as if to get away, and feels that the sound of him simply breathing is far too _loud_.

It’s not louder than the sounds of crying. But it makes him feel this strange combination of hot and cold, as if his body can’t quite decide what it wants to be. Something nasty snaps at him from the deep recesses of his mind. Guilt, maybe, even though he hasn’t done anything at all.

Inside the kitchen, Shiro’s watery voice bounces off the walls. White fluorescent light spills from beneath the bottom of the door across Keith’s feet. 

“Are you—” Shiro begins, only to be cut off by his own strained sob. His voice is thick in a way that Keith has never heard before.

“No,” Adam says. “I know.”

He’s not trying to listen. But it’s so quiet that Keith can’t help but to focus on any sound he hears. His gut twists unpleasantly, that nasty feeling from before spreading. Time becomes immobile as he holds his breath, waiting for something to happen.

There’s the sound of a chair scraping against the floor. Shiro sniffles. Adam is quiet.

And then, “Go to sleep, Takashi.”

The light beneath the door looks more like a wall of flames, threatening to burn him if he stays too close. Keith inches backwards, but not before the door creaks open, his hand still curled around the knob.

“Keith?” Shiro looks genuinely shocked. “What are you doing here?”

There’s nothing accusatory about his tone, but Keith still feels like he has to defend himself.

“Thirsty,” he manages.

His eyes drift past Shiro, over his shoulder to Adam. There’s a cool, neutral expression on his face. It’s the way he always looks at Keith, but this time it makes him feel itchy all over. There are tiny, invisible bugs crawling across his skin, and they move faster and faster the longer Adam keeps his unwavering stare on him.

“Ah,” Shiro says, with this tiny, forced half-smile. "Goodnight, Keith."

He presses past Keith, removing the wall he’d put between Keith and Adam. Like this, Keith has no one else to avert his gaze to. Adam reaches for the mug in front of him, taking a slow, deep sip that feels like it stretches on for hours.

“You should go to sleep, cadet,” Adam says simply.

He’s being dismissed, Keith knows, and yet he can’t move. He feels pinned in place by Adam’s eyes, trapped even though they’re feet apart. Adam’s mug clinks against the table when he sets it down.

The sound finally spurs him into motion. Keith turns back, all but fleeing to the barracks. His room is empty and cold when he pushes himself inside. His roommate’s bed is neatly made, the way it’s been since he washed out the week before.

He strips his socks off and buries himself under the scratchy, Garrison-issued blanket. The sheets feel like sandpaper against his skin. He stares at the bottom of the mattress above his own, throat dry.

He doesn’t count the seconds it takes him to fall asleep. There will be too many for _that_.

Shiro’s eyes are dark and sunken. He’s sitting with the other lieutenants, sandwiched between Matt and someone else Keith doesn’t know. His breakfast is largely untouched, though he pushes a piece of scrambled egg around with the back of his fork.

Keith stares down into his bowl of soggy cereal. A lone corn flake stares back him, floating along, with all others of its kind sitting in the bottom of Keith’s stomach. He feels nauseous, somehow, and pushes his bowl away from him.

His eyes search for Shiro again, but the spot he once occupied is vacated. Even his tray his gone. Something shifts in Keith. Worry maybe, which is an odd thing in itself.

He’s never worried about anyone other than himself before.

Shiro is running maintenance on the hoverbikes. There’s a grease-stained towel slung over his shoulder, his back to Keith as he tinkers with this and fiddles like that.

He doesn’t announce his presence, but Shiro knows he’s there even before he fully steps into the garage. Somehow he always does. He glances up when Keith leans against the table, where a toolbox worth of wrenches and screws and who knows what are laid out.

“Did Iverson let you out early?”

“Kind of,” Keith says, because thirty minutes earlier is hardly much. Shiro hums quietly.

“You give him trouble?”

“Not any more than usual,” Keith offers, and it’s more or less the truth. He’d been called a show-off again, but he hadn’t punched Griffin’s stupidly straight nose this time (it’s probably crooked now, actually).

Shiro’s smile is a brief flash of teeth. Keith tugs at a loose thread on his shirt until it snaps, unable to hold on with all the force he applies to it. Shiro’s breaths are even and soft, and he focuses on them so he doesn’t have to look at his face.

“I’m going to test this out,” Shiro announces then, clapping his hands and standing up. He wipes his hands roughly on the towel.

Keith isn’t sure if it’s an invitation. He eyes the hoverbike, shined bright enough that it’ll make someone go blind from the Arizona sun hitting off it.

That something from before is back with a vengeance. It gets worse the longer he can _just_ make out the shape of Shiro’s body in his peripheral vision. Shiro holds a helmet out to him and it feels awfully like a peace offering, even if there isn’t a need to make peace between them.

Keith takes it after exactly eight seconds. Shiro’s mouth quirks up into a smile, the genuine one that sometimes makes Keith’s brain go fuzzy. He doesn’t try to think about it. Not even a bit.

Riding feels like home. Keith can feel the strength of the bike beneath him, the power between each of sharp turns he takes. Shiro rides ahead and Keith follows, helpless to do anything else. In the distance, the sun is beginning to disappear behind the mountains. It’ll be night soon.

They stop at the usual outlook, where the desert stretches for miles upon miles in that silently imposing way it does. The dirt beneath Keith’s feet is red, brighter than even the bike he leans against.

Shiro has his hands in his pocket, neck turned so his face is to the desert. A soft wind picks up the dirt at his feet, spins it in a tiny tornado that Keith is foolishly worried will somehow suck Shiro up and away.

Shiro is handsome, as always. Everyone knows it. Keith too, because he’s not _blind_. But there’s more to him than a pretty face. There’s more to him that Keith learns about day by day, all because Shiro had been the one to choose _him_.

He’d never been chosen by anyone before. It’s a strange thing to think about.

“I broke it off.”

Shiro doesn’t really elaborate, but Keith doesn’t need him to. _Adam_.

“I’m—” He tries to apologize, not sure what else to say in the moment. But Shiro keeps talking.

“What would you do?”

“About what?”

“If you were running out of time,” Shiro begins, slow. “What would you do?”

There’s that icy-hot feeling running through Keith’s veins again.

“I don’t know. Anything I could.”

“Right,” Shiro agrees, nodding to himself. “Even if it was dangerous?”

“Maybe. Depends on what dangerous is.”

“Life-threatening.” Shiro looks at him, but it really feels like he’s looking _through_ him. “Would you do something absolutely crazy because you knew you were going to die anyway?”

Die.

The word strikes him in the chest. Keith feels this lump grow in his throat. He might choke on it, might choke himself to death on nothing but his own fear, digging cold, cold fingers into the base of his spine.

“What are you talking about?”

He sounds more curt than he intended. His entire body is tense, waiting to spring into action. Whatever that may be.

“I’m on borrowed time,” Shiro says cryptically. Keith’s eyes fall to his wrist, at the watch he never seems to be without.

He’s not fully sure he understands. Shiro’s watch beeps, a sound that he would’ve brushed off had this been any other time. But this time, Keith can’t look away from it. He stares at it, maybe trying to incinerate it with his eyes.

“You’re sick.”

It’s not how he wants to say it. But there isn’t a nice way to talk about it. _You’re dying_ would’ve been worse. He’s lucky he’s said something palatable, even if it doesn’t feel that way.

Keith doesn’t fully understand, but he understands this. The watch. Adam. Shiro’s tears. The way he looks small and scared, even though he’s got about four inches and fifty-something pounds on Keith.

“Yes.”

It takes him a moment to realize Shiro’s confirming it. It stings, in a way Keith forgot words could.

“You weren’t going to tell me,” he says, knowing it to be the truth. Shiro’s guilty expression is hard to look at.

“You shouldn’t have to worry about me.”

“You don’t get to decide what I can handle.” He feels the frustration simmer inside of him, like boiling water in a pot, covered with a lid that won’t be able to hold him back once he starts.

It takes eight seconds for Shiro to speak again.

“I’m going to Kerberos. Adam…he’s not okay with it.”

Kerberos.

He doesn’t know the tiny details of the mission. Keith’s nothing more than a lowly cadet, after all. But the Garrison had been buzzing with rumors about it for months. Only the best of the best would get to go. That much had been obvious. Even more so was the fact that Shiro fit squarely in that category.

The youngest pilot to command a solo mission. The most talented person the Garrison had ever had walk through its halls. Takashi Shirogane was someone everyone wished to be, so _of course_ the Garrison would choose him for Kerberos.

Somehow, in some way, Keith feels like a child again. With uncontrollable emotions, lashing out because it’s the only way he knows how to express himself.

“You could die.”

“I know,” Shiro says, as if he’s talking about the weather and not his life. “It’s a risk I’m willing to take.”

_But what if I’m not?_

He doesn’t say it. But he knows Shiro can hear it. He always does. He knows everything Keith tries to hide, no matter how small.

He knows what Keith’s thinking, how he can’t understand how Shiro can sacrifice himself for something like this. How anger and fear are two emotions on the side of the same coin, and Keith uses the former to mask the latter.

He knows that Keith fears the loneliness more than anything. That’s he’s got a Shiro-shaped spaced carved out in his heart that he can’t bear to lose. That no one other than Shiro can fill.

It takes Keith eight seconds to come up with nothing other than a lousy _“Fine.”_

Shiro deflates. He’d expected a fight. But whatever fighting words Keith has are drained out of him, replaced only by his own puzzling, suffocating feelings.

Shiro is all Keith has, but he hides away from him.

 _Like a child_ , he reminds himself. Doesn’t matter that he’s eighteen, an adult in the eyes of the law. Deep down, he’s a child and he _knows_ that.

He’s not a man. Not like Shiro.

Keith’s gloved hand connects with the punching bag. The angle is awkward, and pain ricochets up his arm and through his shoulder. He powers on, sweat-soaked bangs hanging into his eyes. Part of his wishes it was the crunch of cartilage beneath his fist, the give of flesh. He sees Griffin, and for a brief second, Shiro.

He stops. Chest heaving, breath coming in short, stuttered gasps. There’s guilt again, rearing its ugly head, worse than before.

It takes eight torturous seconds for it to fade into the background, hidden amongst all of Keith’s other grossly complicated thoughts.

The Garrison is big, but it has its limits.

You can’t really, truly hide from anyone, even if you desperately try.

Keith’s coming off another simulation run when he spots Shiro in the office adjacent to the testing room. He’d been watching.

He pauses in front of the door, staring at the back of Iverson’s head. He’s pointing at something, rewinding the footage of the run. Shiro nods, seemingly agreeing. He takes notes and offers comments of his own, maybe about how the cadets can improve.

Keith catches himself on the footage. He’s like a bat out of hell, compared to everything else. Iverson’s probably got words about it, but he only speaks for a few seconds before Shiro says something.

He can’t hear them through the door. On accident, he catches Shiro’s eye over Iverson’s shoulder. Something crosses over his face, but Keith doesn’t stick around to see what it is.

Even so, Shiro finds him after Iverson’s done chewing them out. Final performance exams are coming up, and some of them can’t even wipe their own asses, much less fly. Iverson’s exact words had been something far worse than that, but Keith’s got a particular talent for whittling them down to their bare bones.

They’re not ready.

None of them, not even Keith.

Lance bitches about it, and Keith finds it hard to ignore him. He’s not as bad as Griffin, but when Keith’s already annoyed he _is_. He’s talking to Hunk and another one of their classmates as they file out of the testing room, waving his hands wildly as he speaks.

A hand clamps onto his shoulder. Keith turns to Shiro standing behind him. Iverson and two other lieutenants are just coming out of the office.

“Cadet,” Shiro says, clearly trying to look every bit the golden boy under Iverson’s careful eyes. “I wanted to speak to you about your performance. There are some things I think you can improve on.”

Iverson and the lieutenants pass by silently. Iverson looks pleased about something, maybe the fact that Keith is now someone else’s problem for the afternoon. Or maybe he’s just paranoid.

Keith shakes Shiro off once Iverson rounds the corner. Shiro’s eyebrows pinch together.

“I’m sorry. I should’ve told you.”

“You did,” Keith bites out. “When it was convenient for _you_.”

“The mission—we leave soon,” Shiro’s words are jumbled and disoriented.

_Don’t you have anything you want to say to me? Will you still be mad when I’m gone?_

Shiro doesn’t say the words, but Keith fills in the gaps himself. He doesn’t know accurate they are.

There are words, maybe a thousand of them, buzzing around in Keith’s head. But just like always, he can never quite say what he wants. He only knows how to push people away, and never how to bring them closer to him.

“Okay.”

He stares at Shiro’s hand, open-palmed, fingers stretched towards Keith. He looks like he might reach for him again, even if Keith bites his hand off for it. He’s never quite deterred.

“Keith—”

“You can’t just,” he stops, gathering his breath. In the end, he doesn’t say anything else. He’s never held back before, but today he bites his tongue hard enough to bleed. “Whatever. Okay.”

 _You can’t just leave me like that_.

He needs to leave, needs to get somewhere far away from the Garrison and his own feelings and _Shiro_.

Shiro, who’s done nothing wrong, who Keith is watching slip through his very fingers.

The weekend feels like a reward after a grueling week of exams.

He’s sore, brain-fried and body stretched beyond its limits. Even so, Keith finds himself wandering the Garrison grounds long after the other cadets have either fallen asleep or just come back from a night out on town.

He drags his feet, looking for a pebble to kick. The gravel crunches beneath his feet. _Crunch, crunch, crunch._

It’s cool tonight. Keith stretches his fingers apart and lets the wind weave between the empty spaces. It’s a strange comfort, yet he clings onto it.

His other hand runs across the gate separating the Garrison from the rest of Arizona. On any other night, maybe he would’ve climbed it like the others had. But it isn’t like there’s anything waiting for him beyond all of this.

“Keith?”

He shuts his eyes and stops. Maybe it’d been the wind, or a bird, or anything but Shiro. Footsteps inch towards him.

Keith grips the gate in his hand. The Kerberos launch is tomorrow, on a nondescript Saturday afternoon, specifically so that the families of the crew have a chance to say goodbye. The team consists of Matt and Sam Holt. And, of course, Shiro.

He’s never talked about his family. Keith’s never asked about them either.

“Keith.” He can’t quite ignore the soft desperation in Shiro’s voice.

“I wish things were different.”

It’s the first full sentence he’s spoken in days, something more than two dismissive words joined together.

“I do, too,” Shiro tells him.

 _Liar_ , he thinks, but it’s nothing close to the truth. He knows that.

Keith grits his teeth, focusing on the dull ache in his jaw instead of all the thoughts warring in his head.

“I’m not leaving,” Shiro starts. “I’m just…going away.”

“Isn’t that the same thing?”

“No,” he says, so firm that Keith feels he should believe him. “I promise, it’s _not_.”

“Why’re you promising me anything?”

It’s a curious thing, the way Shiro looks frozen when Keith turns to face him. Eight seconds tick by, and Shiro looks like a statue before him.

“Because it’s all I can do.” Shiro holds his hands out in front of him. “That’s all I can give you.”

A promise.

Cold, hot. All over again. Keith squeezes the railing between his fingers, just enough to hurt in that subtle sort of way that you can’t quite ignore fully.

“I’ve known,” Shiro begins delicately, like he’s speaking to a scared animal. “Since the beginning, I’ve known.”

_I’ve known how you felt._

_I’ve known that you loved me._

More than he should have. More than anybody had a right to love anyone else.

He bites at the inside of his cheek, just to give himself something to do. Just to stall, so that he doesn’t have to bare his soul. Just to keep his feelings all to himself, like he’s become so accustomed to doing.

“So, what?” Keith bites out, in the only way he knows how. “You’re telling me to get over it?”

“No,” Shiro mumbles. “I thought you would, but…”

“But?”

“I don’t think you did.”

Keith feels himself stiffen. “You don’t fucking know how I feel.”

Shiro doesn’t flinch at the caustic words, not like Keith wants him to.

“Right. Of course not.”

He wants Shiro to fight him on this, to become combative and say something other than _right_.

There’s the urge to run inching up his spine. It’s tempting thought, to run away from all of this and pretend that nothing has changed between them. But Keith doesn’t move, because he knows that isn’t what he really wants.

“That’s all you’re going to say—”

“I don’t know what else to give you,” Shiro tells him again, the words seeped in something Keith can’t quite acknowledge. “I’ve got nothing but my word.”

It’s not a confession. Not even close. But it makes his stomach twist like it _had_ been.

It takes him eight seconds to close the space between them. He doesn’t fist his hand in the back of Shiro’s shirt like he wants, too afraid that he’ll hold on and never let go. But he lets himself press his face into Shiro’s shoulder, sturdy enough to hold him up.

His body slumps, Shiro’s arms coming up to wrap around him. He’s warm, and the desert is cold, and Keith feels more than he can possibly begin to describe. His fingernails bite into his own palm, stopping him from attempting to bring Shiro impossibly _closer_.

Wrapped up in Shiro like this, the world doesn’t quite stop spinning. But there’s nothing Keith can think of expect for this very moment, a moment that will be burned into his memory like a brand.

“I’ll take it.”

_Whatever you give me, I’ll take it._

Shiro exhales against him. One hand worms its way down to work open Keith’s fist and slot their fingers together.

After eight seconds, Keith presses his thumb against the back of Shiro’s hand. It feels like more than he should ever be allowed to do. But Shiro doesn’t pull away, even when Keith silently begs him to.

Launch day.

The Holts are in some complicated four-way hug. Colleen Holt is crying, and her daughter Katie rubs her back to calm her.

Keith feels out of place. Even more so when Matt looks curiously between him and Shiro.

He doesn’t know what to say. Everything seems like not enough, and even Shiro looks like he’s at a loss for words. Keith can feel the time between them running out, running out and threatening to leave him with absolutely nothing.

Eight seconds left now, eight seconds until Shiro will leave and Keith will be forced to watch with no way to stop him.

But, no. Shiro’s not leaving, is he? He’s going away, and he’ll return when he’s done. Keith tells himself that even though it isn’t as easy as Shiro’d made it seem. He steels his breath, waits for a moment. Six seconds. Five.

“Come back.”

Shiro’s hand squeezes his own. Four seconds.

“I will.”

Three, two.

“Promise me.”

One second left.

“I promise.”

Keith lets go of Shiro’s hand just as time runs out.


End file.
